Bernard Malamud

In the June issue of Commentary, there's an article by Cheryl Miller, "Why Malamud Faded."

The premise of the title is simple: in the late 1950s and through the 1960s, American letters was possessed of three very prominent Jews (both by background and thematically), amongst its authors of prose fiction. This triad consisted of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud.

Roth was the kid of this group. Malamud was born in 1914, Bellow in 1915, and both are now deceased. Roth came into the world in 1933 and amongst us still.

Roth criticized both of his elders in an essay in 1974, "Imagining Jews," which Miller quotes.

Roth said there that Malamud paints any of his Jewish characters as "innocent, passive, virtuous and this to the degree that he defines himself as or is defined by others as a Jew."

This gave to Malamud's work "the lineaments of moral allegory." Roth wants none of it.

Miller quarrels with this reading of the differences among the troika, but she doesn't doubt that there are important differences, and that in terms of the history of taste, they've so far worked in Roth's favor against Malamud.

I summarize all this because I enjoy listening to deep things being argued about, I suppose. I'm not sufficiently erudite to make any observations on Malamud here. And I've read only two of Roth's novels, so I won't pontificate on him either.

I would guess, though, that the tides of opinion will continue their movements which, being tidal, have ebbs as well as flows. Malamud, in short, will have his day.

American Pastoral

I finally broke down and bought a Philip Roth novel.

I keep hearing how wonderful he is. All I can say in reply is that I read "Portnoy's Complaint" once, and was underwhelmed by it. But I figured I owed him (Roth, not Portnoy) another chance.

Also, my uncle and aunt (bless them) got me a coupon for use at any Barnes & Noble as a Christmas gift this year. I used most of the value of the card to buy a non-fiction book on a subject that of course holds some interest for me but that will be unlikely to warm up any entries in this blog. So I inferred I should cut loose and use the remainder of it for something more literary.

So ... Roth it was. I bought a paperback copy of AMERICAN PASTORAL, a novel published eleven years ago.

I was the managing editor of a journal of political polemics at that time, and I edited a rave review of this book. [To be frank, I took a passage in a letter from a friend and turned it into a review with a little editing, but ... hey ... let's just say I edited it.]

Early on, Roth (or, rather, Nathan Zuckerman, the famous author who serves as the first-person narrator) recounts the plot of a novel he read as a boy called THE KID FROM TOMKINSVILLE -- a novel about baseball and a particular baseball player. We can't credit Roth with the plot. There really was such a book:

http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/127/Kid%20from%20Tom.htm

Yet the way Roth writes about the book, its illustrations, and Nathan's reactions to reading that book as a kid is a thing of beauty itself.

Here's just a bit:

"The drawings seemed conceived out of the dark austerities of Depression America. Every ten pages or so, to succinctly depict a dramatic physical moment in the story -- 'He was able to put a little steam in it,' 'It was over the fence,' 'Razzle limped to the dugout' -- there is a blackish, ink-heavy rendering of a scrawny, shadow-faced ballplayer starkly silhouetted on a blank page, isolated, like the world's most lonesome soul, from both nature and man, or set in a stippled simulation of ballpark grass, dragging beneath him the skinny statuette of a wormlike shadow."

You gotta love it.